Environmentalism is a fundamentalist religion with hubris and moral preening “baked in”.

“Carbon Calvinism”

When people think man can stop climate change patterns that last tens of millions of years, when people think a map of the last 100 or even 1000 years of climate change predicts the futures, and when Republicans tout big government to stop big government even though the results are “baked in”, the appropriate words to describe the setup are indeed “climate bubble”.

Calculations suggest that a mere 800,000 years of this process of forming and burying Azolla, along with all the carbon it had sucked out of the atmosphere as it grew, would have been enough to account for the 80% drop in atmospheric CO2 that other rocks suggest happened during the mid Eocene. This, by greatly reducing the greenhouse effect, cooled the Earth from temperatures in which palm trees grew at the poles to the sort that are experienced today.

Much of the Azolla which sank then still remains buried, and with it the Earth-warming carbon it contains. But that carbon has been transformed over the millennia. A good proportion is now oil and gas. And many people are interested in drilling in the Arctic to extract these fossil fuels, burn them and return the carbon to the atmosphere—there, perhaps, to reverse the events of 49m years ago.